From GOAT to government: Venkat Prabhu hands CM Vijay the 'TN07 CM 2026' plate

Director Venkat Prabhu called on Vijay at the chief minister’s Neelangarai residence on Monday and brought him the prop GOAT fans turned into a slogan two years ago. The framed gift carries the original TN07 CM 2026 number plate from the 2024 spy thriller, set against a black mount with a small brass plaque that reads “The First Manifestation By VP & Team”, a miniature GOAT poster, and the yellow-and-red Tamil-state strip framing the registration on either side. In the film, Vijay’s character drives away from a sequence with that exact plate on the back of his car. In 2026, that character has been the chief minister for two weeks, and the plate is in his hands.

Venkat Prabhu posted the photographs to X on Monday with a single line. “A history is made,” he wrote. “From a thought, to a vision, to this moment. Happy to have met our honourable CM @TVKVijayHQ na today and present the very first manifestation of #GOAT. This is only the beginning. TN07CM2026.”

The plate’s history is the part that doesn’t need much explaining inside Tamil Nadu and probably needs all of it explained outside. GOAT, released in September 2024, was the first feature Vijay shot after his political launch. Across the film, Venkat Prabhu seeded several references that fans read as political. The cleanest of them was a shot in which Vijay’s character drove off in a car carrying the plate “TN-07-CM-2026”, the TN-07 being a Chennai number plate code, the CM standing for what the actor was openly campaigning to become, and the 2026 standing for the assembly election he would have to win to get there. Within a day of release, the plate was a meme. Within a week, it was a fan slogan. Twenty months later, on May 10, Vijay was sworn in as chief minister.

The Monday meeting is the latest in a string of film-industry visits to the new chief minister’s office. Venkat Prabhu was already in Vijay’s row at the swearing-in alongside Prakash Raj; Kamal Haasan walked in with a six-point cinema policy charter on Saturday; and Karuppu opened in Tamil Nadu on Friday at 9 AM under a one-off permission the new government cleared on its first release weekend. The Producers Council is, per Rajinikanth’s Saturday press address, still due in.

By Monday evening the photograph had become the image of the week, the prop, the actor, and the office sitting in one frame for the first time.